Free Stasiland by Anna Funder Page A

East Germany ‘the most perfected surveillance state of all time’. At the end, the Stasi had 97,000 employees—more than enough to oversee a country of seventeen million people. But it also had over 173,000 informers among the population. In Hitler’s Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin’s USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens. Everywhere Mielke found opposition he found enemies, and the more enemies he found the more staff and informers he hired to quell them.
    Here, at Normannenstrasse, 15,000 Stasi bureaucrats worked every day, administering the activities of the Stasi overseas, and overseeing domestic surveillance through each of the fourteen regional offices in the GDR.
    Photos show Mielke to be a small man with no neck. His eyes are set close together, his cheeks puffy. He has the face and the lisp of a pugilist. He loved to hunt; footage shows him inspecting a line of deer carcasses as he would a military parade. He loved his medals, and wore them pinned over his chest in shiny, noisy rows. He also loved to sing, mainly rousing marches and, of course, ‘The Internationale’. It is said that psychopaths, people utterly untroubled by conscience, make supremely effective generals and politicians, and perhaps he was one. He was certainly the most feared man in the GDR; feared by colleagues, feared by Party members, feared by workers and the general population. ‘We are not immune from villains among us,’ he told a gathering of high-ranking Stasi officers in 1982. ‘If I knew of any already, they wouldn’t live past tomorrow. Short shrift. It’s because I’m a humanist, that I am of this view.’ And, ‘All this blithering about to execute or not to execute, for the death penalty or against—all rot, comrades. Execute! And, when necessary, without a court judgment.’
    Mielke was born in 1907, the son of a Berlin cartwright. At fourteen he joined the Communist youth organisation, and at eighteen the Party. Through the 1920s and early 1930s, the political situation in Germany was volatile—there were street fights between the Communists and the Nazis, and the Communists and the police. The 1931 death of a Communist in a skirmish in Berlin prompted the Party to order revenge. On 8 August, at a demonstration at Bülowplatz, Mielke and another man killed the local police chief and his off-sider by shooting them in the back at point-blank range.
    Mielke fled to Moscow. There, he attended the International Lenin School, the elite training ground for Communist leaders, and worked with Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. In January 1933 the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. Some of the Communists responsible for the Bülowplatz murders were sentenced to death, others to long jail terms. A warrant was issued for his arrest.
    Mielke stayed out of Germany. In the late 1930s he was active in the Spanish Civil War; by his own account, he was interned in France during World War II. But afterwards Stalin decorated him with medals for service: it seems clear that from the mid-1930s, wherever he was, Mielke was a hatchet man in Stalin’s secret service.
    When the war was over he returned to the Soviet sector of Berlin, where he was safe from prosecution. He worked in the internal affairs division of the Soviet-run police force. In 1957 Mielke engineered a coup against its leader, and then he took over as Minister for State Security. He proceeded to consolidate his power within the Party and over the country. In 1971 he helped organise the coup which brought Erich Honecker to power as Secretary-General. Honecker rewarded Mielke with candidacy for the Politbüro, and a house in the luxurious Party compound at Wandlitz. From that time on the two Erichs